


On the Ice

by Snickfic



Category: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:24:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Conversations in a tent at the top of the world.





	On the Ice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merisunshine36](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merisunshine36/gifts).



“Had your parents other children, on your world?” Estraven asked one night, as we sat within the enfolding embrace of the Chabe stove. 

I took another drink from my cup, where my cube of gichy-michy had nearly dissolved. The small grainy lump that remained stirred to and fro in the bottom. “Several. Two male-siblings—or half-siblings, rather.” Karhidish had the word for male, of course, in order to discuss pesthry and fish and Gethen’s few other native species of fauna. It was a word for animals, but I had no better. “They were considerably older than me. I didn’t know them well. And my female-sibling Orla, a couple of years my senior.” 

“They’re all dead now, too?” Estraven asked. 

“Both of my male-siblings are. My female-sibling was well when I last heard from him—elderly, but not infirm. The elder years last a long time on Earth, with luck and good medical care. We spoke by ansible before I landed on Gethen. He has great-grandchildren now.” Of course I had no pronoun to distinguish her from my brothers, only the same pronoun that Karhiders use for everyone. 

The windburn had surely toughened the skin of Estraven’s face to leather the same as it had mine, but the stove’s warm glow softened it as he smiled. He was pleased for me, for my parents and my sister and their good fortune. “Are these male children, or female?”

I laughed. “Some of each, I think. I don’t know. It was difficult to keep track. I only met his eldest child before I left.”

Estraven nodded thoughtfully, sipping from his own cup. “A child of his flesh.”

“That’s right.”

“And your _brothers_ —” He said the word in my own language, cautiously. Only then did I remember telling it to him, in Erhenrang. That time and place seemed as distant from our little tent as the Earth of my childhood. “They had no children of their flesh.”

“No.”

“And you’ll have none,” he said, on surer ground now.

“No,” I agreed.

He was silent on this a while, as he finished his gichy-michy. At last he said, “You do not regret it, I suppose. You never expected to bear children.”

I had not thought of it much during my time on Gethen. There were a great many qualities of Gethenian life that I had avoided trying to imagine for my own. In the cramped solitude of that tent there seemed room to think of them. The prospect of kemmer I shied away from still, but I let myself imagine the period after that, when I would nurture a life in my own body and wait in hopefulness of a child, growing heavy and fat with the waiting. For a disorienting moment I knew myself not to be a man nor even a woman, only another citizen of this world, waiting for the sweet, fearful pain of birth.

I awoke out of this vision with a start to find Estraven watching me mildly with those coal-pit eyes. Shaken, it was a little while before I remembered the question he had asked. “I did not,” I said. “Nor an heir, for that matter. I did not look for children.” And in fact I never have had any, though I might have done. Several of my colleagues have produced children in the years since they made land. Envoys are not selected for their strong procreative drive, however, and no one among my colleagues has ever awakened that yearning in me.

“It’s easier, then, going into exile,” Estraven said, with a certain ambivalent satisfaction, as if he had settled finally on a solution to a problem long worried at.

“I never really thought of my mission that way,” I said honestly. “I did choose to go, after all.”

He gave this considerable thought, leaving me to my own thoughts. Only after we had put our cups away did I think to return his question back to him. “And you? Do you have children?” It seemed very odd, suddenly, that I didn’t know the answer.

“I have an heir,” he said in his quiet way.

“A child of the flesh?”

“No,” Estraven said. Something in his manner prevented me from asking further. He turned off the stove’s light emissions, and we went to sleep.

\--

Estraven was free with his stories of Kerm Land, the hearths there, the winters spent gathered around those hearths while the Ice loomed in the distance, inescapable. I think he considered it fair coin for the information he teased slowly from me in his roundabout fashion to temporarily slake his endless thirst for knowledge. 

He did not tell me of his family, though, or the circumstances of his exile, except what I could glean in the empty spaces he did not fill. “Do you miss your world?” he asked, in one of those quiet after-supper evenings, while the wind blew against our tent.

I hesitated. I could readily recite the great regions of Earth, organized around the capitals of fallen nation-states. I could tell him about the great fauna; the restoration of the reefs, just completed this past century; the polar ice not so different from this Ice. These were the equivalent of his stories of fording the rivers of Kerm Land in spring. They were not what he wanted.

“The food, I suppose.”

“Better than Karhidish food?” he asked, twinkling.

“Better than in Orgoreyn, certainly,” I said. “My parent of the flesh was a good cook. He favored herbs he could grow in his garden—oregano and thyme and sage. You have nothing like sage on Karhide.” Nor had Ahn, where I’d done the greater part of my training. “We put it on tubers and meat. I suppose I’ll never taste it again.” Against expectation, I felt a pang at that. Surely I hadn’t thought of sage in half a decade, or more, nor tasted it in twice that long.

“And the people?” he asked, more softly. “Do you miss them?”

In that moment I was warmed by the stove and my downed broth of gichy-michy, and by something deeper than either of those: a warmth of the soul kindled in those weeks, which the fiercest winds of Winter could not touch. I looked into Estraven’s wind-burned face, and full of fellow-feeling, I said, “The Ekumen is full of people.”

He looked at me at me for so long that in another man I’d have found it disconcerting. I’d come to expect it in Estraven, that habit of looking deeply, which I suppose he had cultivated at his Fastness long before. At last he said gravely, “That is so, Genly Ai. That is so.” But then he gave me such a smile that I’ve never forgotten it, as warm as a sunrise over Borland City. “Out there in the stars, isn’t that right? People everywhere.”

Now there are more of them on Gethen, several dozen from the Ekumen whom Estraven never had opportunity to see. I shall regret that all the rest of my life. Still it is some comfort to me to know that the knowledge comforted him. 

\--

Even in all our gear, evolved and proven on the planet it was designed for, sometimes the cold became too much for us. A wind picked up a few hours before dusk one afternoon, sweeping past us and stealing all our heat away with it. I had just cleared my eye-slits of ice for the third time when Estraven called a halt for the day. We followed Estraven’s prescribed procedures to the letter, but clumsily, with fingers gone numb even through our gloves. It seemed an hour before we dove inside our tent at last and zipped the door shut. It was fifty below zero degrees F and falling.

When we had thawed somewhat around the stove, Estraven asked me for a story from my world. I demurred at first, for I’m no great storyteller even among my fellows, much less compared to Gethenians, all raised in the oral tradition from birth. Estraven cared little for my protests. This is not to say he argued, only that he smiled to himself all through my explanations, and when I'd worn them out he was still waiting patiently.

So: a story. Something of Earth, a folk tale, comparable to what Karhiders would tell one another at the hearth. My thoughts fell first on the ancient myth of the man Robin who wore a hood; fortunately I remembered in time that daring feats of thievery would not amuse Estraven.

The wind had fallen somewhat by then, so it no longer beat against the sides of our tent but only threw endless grains of snow against them, whispering. Estraven watched me with that stillness of his, his brown face lit golden by the Chabe stove. In the intimacy of that isolation, I thought of another story long told on my world, of two strangers who choose to travel together across a vastness nearly as unforgiving as the Ice.

I had to explain myself a good deal, of course. First I had to explain whales, which was not so difficult, since the Gethenians do have fish. Then I explained about their fat and the rendering of it, or what I recalled, anyway. I was never very interested in those aspects of the tale. I told the story of the captain, who wished vengeance upon one particular whale. Estraven was not very impressed by this part. Who, he asked, had the time or luxury to chase after a beast, while winter chased on his heels? I don’t think it’s possible for a person of Gethen to imagine a life in which the ice and cold do not hound him. 

Through it all labored the two strangers who became something more than friends: the sailor and the man with the harpoon. I told the story poorly; I hadn’t the skill to do otherwise. I left out a great deal. At last the heroes’ ship was broken to pieces, the whale gone, the captain gone. They ended the story as they began: only two.

“And did they live?” Estraven asked.

“I choose to believe so,” I said. The story finished, I felt a sudden, burning foolishness for comparing myself and Estraven to the brother-strangers of a folk tale. We were only human, not myths. We stood no taller than other men.

Estraven surprised me then. He said, “Perhaps we’ll become a tale, one day. Therem Harth rem ir Estraven and Genly Ai, who crossed the Gobrin Ice in winter to bring new men down from the stars.”

I laughed, startled by this flight of fancy. Playfulness was not a mood I saw in Estraven often, even back in Erhenrang. “And when will that be? When shall we call them down?”

“With luck, we’ll be off the Ice in twenty days,” he said, with his characteristic caution. Yet the light of that humor was with him all that afternoon, until dusk stole it away.

end


End file.
